Archive for April, 2010
Unlocking Genetic Diversity with the Backyard Seed Vault Project
By Mat Rogers The 1979 children’s book Ox-Cart Man describes a colonial family who spends all year raising a crop and an ox, building the ox’s cart, and making mittens, brooms, and candles. Then the ox-cart man sets off to market to sell the crop and the mittens, brooms,
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Goldman Prize winners fight against CAFO pollution, shark finning and monocultures
The Goldman Environmental Prize was awarded to six grassroots environmental heroes from around the world in San Francisco last Monday night. Three of the six 2010 winners are working directly in food-related areas. Lynn
Bringing everyone to the table: A review of “PolyCultures”
A handful of recent movies - most notably "Food, Inc." and "Fresh" - have undoubtedly boosted the number of people with something to say about national food policy. And just as the local foods movement emphasizes supporting local farms and producers, filmmakers are beginning to take a closer look at
Food Corps puts new energy into school lunch programs
You've probably heard about service programs that put volunteer teaching assistants in classrooms of underprivileged schools or put new college graduated into troubled schools. A new program called Food Corps puts a twist in that old formula, sending volunteers into school kitchens and purchasing offices.
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The Marin Carbon Project studies carbon sequestration
Soil carbon sequestration — the process of converting gaseous carbon dioxide into carbon in the soil — offers a promising (and possibly necessary) route to addressing climate change
Following the cycle of soil
In a cover article for Ode Magazine, Larry Gallagher describes the planet's soil problem — poor land-use practices destroy soil faster than nature can create it — and examines how farmers and others are trying to solve the problem. He starts with a visit to Ecology Action in California's Mendocino
In search of the self-pollinating almond
Giving bees the brush-off: California almonds, a multi-billion dollar crop, are almost completely dependent on honey bees for pollination. During the short pollination season, a significant fraction of the U.S. honeybee colonies are in the almond orchards — in 2004, for example, sixty percent of
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S.F. restaurants experiment with wine on tap
Kicking the bottle habit: Instead of recycling bins overflowing with empty 750 mL bottles, you'll see reusable wine casks outside a handful of San Francisco restaurants. Long a tradition in Europe, these restaurants — which include such luminaries as Salt House, OTD, Delfina, and Frances — are
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Monkeying around: Berkeley woman hires out fruit-picking primate
I was eating breakfast at North Berkeley's Guerrilla Cafe the other day when I spotted a sign on the other side of
